Review: Great God Grove

Words have weight, which is why I swing them around with reckless abandon. I’m not sure that’s what Great God Grove is about unless you only take it literally. It’s more about identity, authority, communication, and misunderstanding.

It’s the follow-up to Smile For Me by Limbolane. But while the two games have similarities, you might miss the relation just by looking at it. One game has you interred in an asylum, while the other has you fixing the relationships of the gods. However, what they have in common is head nods and fixing people.

Great God Grove (Switch, Xbox Series X|S, PC [Reviewed])
Developer: Limbolane
Publisher: LimboLane, Fellow Traveller
Released: November 15th, 2024
MSRP: $19.99

Great God Grove puts you in the boots of a Godpoke, which is, as far as I can tell, a sort of courier. To be honest, I’m not clear on a few concepts here. For all I know, a Godpoke might just be someone who wears a poncho. You arrive at the eponymous grove just in time to see the gods close a giant rift in the sky that threatens to end the world. The problem is that the gods aren’t entirely interested in saving the world. They’re far too wrapped up in their own problems.

Previous to your arrival, the last messenger of the gods, the mysterious King, sent letters out to all the gods. The letters are obvious attempts to drive wedges between them, but as King had always been a trusted friend and reliable enough to be elected to become the next god, they took those words at face value. Now, nothing is right in the grove despite being a crucial time for the whole world.

Before you even get to the grove, King’s trusty mail cannon, the Megapon, lands directly in your lap. With this device, you can suck the words out of one person’s mouth and slap them in the face of another. Or just right back at them. That happens sometimes.

Being the wise person you are (or maybe just because it’s a linear narrative), you set to work righting King’s wrong. Immediately, you’re deputized by Inspekta, the God of Leadership, to help their lackeys, the Bizzyboys, figure out what happened to King and why they decided to hurt everyone’s feelings. However, the leader of the Bizzyboys, Capochin, is only out to please his boss, while the rest of the members are completely incompetent and hapless. So, it all comes down to you.

Largely, Great God Grove resembles a point-and-click adventure game. You can’t suck up any sentence or grouping of words you want; only specific, highlighted things that characters say can go in your Megapon. In this way, they work like any item in something like Secret of Monkey Island. You find hints in the words of the people you’re talking to and deliver something that will get them to perform some task for you, even if that’s just moving out of the way.

There’s a bit of a learning curve. For the first area, I wasn’t picking up on the cues, but after the second, I was able to proceed with some expedience. I didn’t get hung up very often, but I have to wonder if that’s going to be everyone’s experience. Great God Grove has an unusual design language built around its central hook, and I’m not sure if gaming literacy will be as important here as actual literacy. I’m not sure if every player can adjust, or maybe I’m the odd one because I had some issues in the first area. I can only speak to my own experience, though, and in my experience, I didn’t have much of a problem for most of the game.

Each area of the grove is home to one or two gods. In each one, King has spread some sort of misinformation to throw things into chaos, and your overall goal is to sort things out to restore the status quo. Sounds easy, but being an adventure game, it takes more than an apology to work things out.

What really elevates Great God Grove above a typical adventure game is an abundance of style. It mixes 2D characters and objects with a 3D world Paper Mario-style. It’s based around Day Lane’s distinctive, sketchy, expressive style. While animation is sparse, each character has a massive range of poses and emotions that they transition to each new window of dialogue. It can be quite captivating.

Many of the gods are rendered in full 3D, but they’re styled in such a way that it can be hard to tell. Like the 2D folks, the gods spring from pose to pose, with more traditional animation thrown in occasionally to spice things up.

There are also live-action puppet vignettes that you can watch for not much reason aside from enrichment. They generally just involve the Bizzyboys giving advice and some background information about what’s going on in the world. As it turns out, I’m really into puppets eating sandwiches. 

There isn’t much out that that looks quite like Great God Grove. The style is executed so consistently and with so much blunt-force pizzazz that it’s incredible that just a handful of people put the whole thing together. There are so many facets of its visual style that look as though they would be very difficult to execute, so the fact that they didn’t choose an easier, more conventional route is impressive. It pays off because, if absolutely nothing else, the way this game looks will be seared into your eyeholes.

Great God Grove has a lot to say about identity and the way people will stomp on others just for recognition. The gods themselves aren’t much different than ordinary people. They just exist on a less accessible plane of existence. As such, even though you can walk up and talk to them, their followers seem to just believe what they hear and speculate on what they might be thinking, which often is what leads to miscommunication. Misinformation is rife, and people take advantage of that.

Humans seem hardwired to climb. There’s a fear that our lives will be meaningless or forgotten, so we strive for recognition. And to secure our recognition, we’ll often stomp down the people beneath us. We yearn to wear the stomping boots, and a decent person can turn awful the moment they put them on. You face a lot of that in Great God Grove.

At the same time, it’s a very optimistic game. With your intervention, the troublemakers you meet see the error in their ways and express a desire to atone for their actions. Call me cynical, but I find most people are more likely to become defensive when faced with the consequences of their actions. People dig their stomping boots in and seek justification for what they’ve done. Maybe I just need a stronger word cannon.

In terms of gameplay, I could honestly take or leave Great God Grove. It has great pacing and a unique approach to the adventure genre, but I find the situations in which it’s applied generally unexciting. Not overly mundane, but I think with urgent focus on the threat and more dangerous situations, the dialogue would have more of a chance to shine. But it already shines pretty brightly.

Great God Grove is an immensely polished and precisely executed game, and that’s the most impressive part about it. Its pacing and aesthetic are finely honed and there’s nary a loose thread to be found. A bit more punch and the narrative would be perfect, but it presents a good amount of depth to sink into. It also features puppets gnawing on a gigantic hoagie, and really, what more can you ask for?

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}